I consider myself an individualist and a cosmopolitan so the question of race doesn’t apply to me personally. However, I was always fascinated by it since high school. Given that, I never took to Martin Luther King Jr’s approach to racial integration in the manner that it transpired. I believe it was inevitable that it would be passed but the policies were not executed properly.
After reading Malcolm X’s autobiography and watching his interviews, I agreed with his approach much more than King’s. King’s racial integration was doomed for failure because it put blacks in a precarious position not to establish their own communities and institutions on par with whites but instead made them subservient to their institutions. This is proven with the advent of affirmative action to push for racial integration by force rather than by organic means. Now I don’t believe segregation was right. It was right to ban segregation legally. It was an immoral piece of legislation. But once again, I am troubled by its enforcement.
In many ways, whites were forced to integrate with blacks even though a great amount didn’t want to. We see through the 1980s that Neo-Nazis sprouted up in reaction to forced racial integration. They were deemed ignorant and hateful– which they were– but seldom did anyone inquire as to what they were angry about. And undoubtedly, they were angry about forced racial integration and the fear that blacks would ruin their communities. As much as I am grieved to say, they weren’t necessarily wrong. Blacks have done a bit of damage in many communities that were formerly white. We must be perfectly honest about this.
Affirmative action was patently unfair to white men. It also enabled other policies to cater more towards minorities than white men. In my opinion, affirmative action was done as reparations for black people for slavery, as that is the only explanation that makes sense to me. In fact, it is understood that affirmative action would be temporary and not needed after a certain point. But it is wrong. It is against the spirit of the US Constitution and America as a nation and it was inevitable that a powder-keg would explode. That explosion was Donald Trump.
Racial integration is necessary for America to succeed as a nation. But it must be done properly. Malcolm X’s approach to help blacks build up their communities and institutions must be adopted. But given blacks’s appalling need for revenge and their juvenile entitlement behavior for reparations and victimization, it will take a few generations to get started in that direction. But the responsibility must be on blacks themselves and whites must let go of the false guilt they have had for decades. If America is to heal, these are things we must think about.